The entity that runs India’s stock market is about to become a stock on India’s market. The National Stock Exchange of India Ltd (NSE) has filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), setting the stage for what could be one of the country’s largest-ever initial public offerings.
The exchange is targeting a listing before December 2026, with expected proceeds in the range of ₹20,000 to ₹30,000 crore. The NSE’s implied pre-IPO valuation sits between ₹4.75 lakh crore and ₹5.05 lakh crore, which would place it among the most valuable companies on its own exchange.
A decade in the making
The NSE has been trying to go public for nearly ten years, with regulatory issues first surfacing in 2016 that kept the listing in limbo. The breakthrough came when NSE proposed settling those legacy regulatory cases with SEBI for approximately ₹1,491 crore. That settlement effectively cleared the runway for the DRHP filing, which landed around June 17, 2026.
The offering is expected to be structured as a pure Offer for Sale (OFS), meaning the NSE itself won’t be raising fresh capital. Instead, existing shareholders will sell down portions of their stakes. The State Bank of India, Singapore’s Temasek, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Life Insurance Corporation (LIC), and ChrysCapital are all expected to participate in the sell-down.
